In November 2001, I discovered wikis. I [decided to set one up for myself](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/11/12/spirolattic/ “See the announcement post.”) and the people I was gravitating around with: [SpiroLattic](http://spirolattic.net/). The wiki died due to spam and is now up again. Prepare for a trip down memory lane.

Back in 2001, I was all a-buzz about [web standards](http://webstandards.org/ “The Web Standards Project.”), after the [“browser push” campaign](http://web.archive.org/web/20010604123432/webstandards.org/upgrade/). Who remembers those times? It seems like so long ago, now. I first [thought about it](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/02/24/tableaux-ou-non/ “Should we stop using HTML tables for layout?”), [translated “To Hell With Bad Browsers”](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/03/21/faire-part/ “Announcement.”) and launched [Pompage.net](http://pompage.net “A respected French-speaking translation ressource for web design and standards.”) in the process, before [converting my site to a tableless layout](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/04/16/site-going-tableless/ “Here I am at it.”) and publishing [a tutorial which soon became pretty popular](http://climbtothestars.org/coding/tableless “Have a peek. Still uses the old layout, haven’t imported it into WordPress yet.”). As I understood very recently during an interview, I’m interested in doing what not many people are doing. I like the cutting-edge stuff. So at the time, it was web standards — because people needed evangelising and convincing that you could do great stuff with CSS, and that producing standards-compliant markup was important. Now, most people are sold on the topic, so I’ve moved on. I guess that when nobody wonders if they need a blog or not, or what blogs can do for them, I’ll have moved on to something else too.

So, anyway. That’s for the historical context. At the end of 2001, there were hardly any French-language wikis (I think I found a couple), and wikis were [bland-looking](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki “Like the original wiki.”) and didn’t [validate](http://validator.w3.org “Don’t try, there are probably a few validation errors in this page!”).

So, I downloaded [PHPWiki](http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/), because it was in PHP and I knew I could hack it, dug through lines and lines of code, and finally ended up with a wiki engine which output valid HTML. Then, with the help of [Stephanie Troeth](http://unadorned.org/dandruff/ “Keep an eye on her blog.”), who came up with the neat background graphic and kept my bad design sense in check while I did the CSS, I came up with what was, to my knowledge, the first pretty standards-compliant wiki.

We had fun for a moment with it. It was bilingual, like CTTS. We talked about [hiding one’s real name](http://web.archive.org/web/20040330025101/spirolattic.net/index.php?pagename=VraiNomDiscussion), about [education](http://web.archive.org/web/20041028083904/http://spirolattic.net/Education). I wrote one of the first articles on what a weblog was in French on SpiroLattic: [C’est quoi un weblog?](http://spirolattic.net/CestQuoiUnWeblog “Written in July 2002. Top search result for ages.”). Sometime in [May 2002](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2002/05/14/swiss-weblogs/ “View the post.”), I started collecting all the [Swiss blogs I could lay my hands upon](http://web.archive.org/web/20020807210524/http://spirolattic.net/SwissBlogs “See what the list was like in July 2002.”), and that list grew and grew, to finally become [SwissBlogs](http://swissblogs.com “The oldest directory of Swiss blogs. Soon to be revamped.). I used it as a scrap-book for various projects. It was a working space for the launch of [OpenWeb](http://openweb.eu.org “Another respected French language web standards community.”).

So, what happened?

Well, first, the wiki never reached critical mass, so contributions slowly dwindled away. Then, spam. Some of the pages on the wiki were very popular and became the target of ugly spambots. At some point, [I got tired of cleaning up all the spam](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/12/17/wiki-spam-on-phpwiki/) and decided to pull the site down and install another engine. [Which I did](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/03/27/mediawiki/). It just took time.

So, dating from today, [SpiroLattic](http://spirolattic.net/) is back into existance. As transferring the pages from PHPwiki to MediaWiki proved a monstrous problem, particularly as I don’t have a working install of PHPwiki anymore, I’ve hunted through the [internet archive](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://spirolattic.net/ “Look through the internet archive of SpiroLattic.”) for clean versions of some old pages that I’ve either transferred into the new wiki or [just collected on a special page](http://spirolattic.net/InternetArchiveMaterial “Check it out.”).

I know it won’t reach critical mass or even attract much public, but at least I have a wiki playground for whenever I need it!

I bumped into one small problem installing MediaWiki 1.4: the install aborted while creating the tables. Unfortunately, I don’t have the error message anymore, but it was very close to the one given for this bug.

If I understood correctly, when you’re running MySQL 4.1.x in UTF-8, the index key becomes too big, and MySQL balks. The solution is to edit maintenance/tables.sql and to change the length of the index key MySQL was complaining about. In my case, the guilty part of the query was KEY cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)) — I replaced 128 by 50 and it went fine. (Don’t forget to clean out the partially built database before reloading the install page — like that you don’t have to fill it all in again.)

MediaWiki allows each user to choose his or her language of choice for the interface. That is absolutely great, particularly for a multilingual wiki! Even better than that, they let users tweak the interface translation strings directly on the wiki.

There is a page named “Special:Allmessages” which lists all the localized strings. If you’re not happy with one of the translations, just click on the string, and the wiki will create a new blank page where you can enter your translation for it, which will override the initial translation. How cool is that?

Call for suggestions for a new wiki engine to run SpiroLattic, victim of too much wiki spam.

Right, I could use some help here, particularly from those of you who are more in touch with the wiki-world than I am at present.

SpiroLattic is a very inactive wiki. However, it does contain some useful pages which are regularly visited, and I’m sick of removing wiki spam from it (the wiki-spam actually succeeded in wiping the Home Page, as the older clean versions of it are not in the database anymore).

I need suggestions for a wiki engine (PHP/MySQL preferred) into which I will be able to import my existing PhpWiki 1.3 alpha something pages, and which is not too vulnerable to wiki spam. I’d like to be able to keep the existing layout, but I don’t think that’s really an issue with today’s wiki engines.

A detailed write-up of the collective note-taking operation we ran at BlogTalk. We took notes together using SubEthaEdit and then posted them to a wiki so that they can be further annotated. The story, and questions this experience raises for me.

I’d like to stress that this was not my idea. I think this collaborative note-taking is a very good example of what happens when you put a bunch of people together with ideas and resources: the result really belongs to all, and credit should go to the group (even though in this case, I don’t think I can identify all the members of this “group”).

The Story

At the beginning of the conference, I was discovering the joys of RendezVous and eagerly saying hi to the small dozen of people I could see online. Sometime during the first panel, I was asked (by Cyprien?) if I had SubEthaEdit, because they were using that to take notes. I downloaded it (thus contributing to the death of wifi and bandwidth), and after a brief struggle managed to display a RendezVous list of users on the network (shortcut: Cmd-K) currently running SubEthaEdit.

I joined Lee Bryant‘s document, which was open for read/write sharing. It contained text (what a surprise!) mainly highlighted in yellow (Lee’s colour, the main note-taker). We were four or five in there at that point. (From Lee’s first publication of the notes I gather that the two others were Roland and Stephan — or rather Leo on Stephan’s computer, like later in the day?) It took a couple of minutes for me to feel comfortable in there, and I started contributing by adding a few links I knew of, on the subject of video blogs. The act of writing in the document made me feel quickly at home with the other note-takers. At some point, I started actively pestering those logged into RendezVous so that they would join us if they had SubEthaEdit (particularly if they were already visible in SubEthaEdit!)

Lee wasn’t there at the beginning of the third panel, so I opened up a document myself in SubEthaEdit, and with a little help managed to open it up to others for reading and writing (File > Access Control > Read/Write) and “announce” it so that other participants could see it. There had already been some hurried talk of publishing our notes, and at some point, Suw (who was keeping up with what was going on on my screen) suggested we should publish them on a wiki. After a quick check with other participants (and with Suw: “you don’t think Joi would mind, do you?”), I grabbed Joi’s wiki and started creating pages and pasting the notes into them.

We continued like that throughout the afternoon and into the next day. As soon as a speaker would have finished and the note-taking seemed to stop, I would copy and paste everything into the wiki.

Reflecting on the Experience

So, now that I have told you the story, what can be said about the way we worked together during this conference? I’m trying to raise questions here, and would be really interested in hearing what others have to say.

Working as a team to take notes has clear advantages: Lee was able to go out and get coffee, and catch up with the notes when he came back. When I couldn’t type anymore, Suw took my computer over and literally transcribed the last couple of panels (OK, that could have been done without the collaborative note-taking, but I had to fit it in somewhere.)

Still in the “team theme”, different roles can be taken by the note-takers: sometimes there is a main note-taker (I noticed this had a tendancy to happen when people wrote long sentences, but there might be other factors — any theories on this welcome), sometimes a few people “share” the main note-taking. Some people will correct typos, and rearrange formatting, adding titles, indenting, adding outside links. Some people add personal comments, notes, questions. Others try to round up more participants or spend half a talk fighting with wiki pages 😉

At one point, I felt a little bad as I was missing out on the current talk with all my wiki-activity. But as Suw says about being part of the hivemind, I don’t think it matters. I acted as a facilitator. I brought out notes to people who were not at the conference. I allowed those more actively taking notes to concentrate on that and not worry about the publication. I went out to try and get other/more/new people interested in collaborating with us. I said to Suw: “keep on tzping, and don’t worrz that zour y’s and z’s are all mixed up because of mz swiss kezboard layout,” while Horst patiently changed them back.

What is the ideal number of note-takers in a SubEthaEdit session? Our sessions ranged from 5-10 participants, approximately. When numbers were fewer, a higher proportion were actively participating. When they were larger, there were lots of “lurkers”. Where they watching the others type, or had they just gone off to do something else, confident that there were already enough active note-takers?

The “Lee Bryant Experiment”, which I will blog about later, set me thinking about the nature of note-taking and notes. What purpose do notes serve? Is it useful to watch others taking notes, or does it really add something when you take them yourself? How concise should good notes be? How does a transcript (what Suw was virtually doing) compare to more note-like notes?

Formatting is an issue which could be fixed. SubEthaEdit is a very raw text editor, so we note-takers tend to just indent and visually organise information on our screen. Once pasted in the wiki, though, a lot of that spatial information is lost. It got a bit better once we knew the notes would be wikified, as we integrated some wiki mark-up (like stars for lists) in our notes, from the start. What could be useful is to put a little cheat-sheet of the wiki mark-up to be used inside the SubEthaEdit document, for the note-takers (just as I defined a “chat zone” at the bottom of the working document, so that we could “meta-communicate” without parasiting the notes themselves).

How groundbreaking was what we did? How often do people take notes collaboratively with SubEthaEdit in conferences? It seemed to be a “first time” for many of the participants, so I guess it isn’t that common. Have you done it already? What is your experience of it? How often do people put up notes or transcripts of conferences on wikis?

Discipline is needed to separate the actual notes (ie, “what the conferencer said”) from the note-taker comments (ie, extra links, commentary, questions, remarks). This isn’t a big issue when a unique person is taking notes for his or her private use, but it becomes really important when more people are involved. I think that although we did do this to some extent, we were a bit sloppy about it.

Information on the wiki page, apart from the notes, should also include pointers to the official presentation the talker made available (not always easy to find!), and I’m also trying to suggest that people who have done proper write-ups of the talks (see Philipp’s write-ups, they are impressive) to add links to them from the appropriate wiki pages (Topic Exchange is great, but lacks detail).

Topic Exchange allows to comfortably solve the problem “do I trackback other related posts, even if I haven’t linked to them directly?” — use Topic Exchange.

If you’re at the conference and/or staying at Hotel Atlas, make use of Rendez-Vous (Rendez-Vous allowed me to “bump” into a fellow blogtalker last night), the BlogTalk wiki page and #blogtalk on freenode. Also — no fear of stating the obvious — come up for a chat, I love meeting others in the flesh!